Land and water ownership and use

When the British began their colonisation of Australia – invasion from an Indigenous perspective – they treated the continent as uninhabited territories, without sophisticated laws. However, the First Australians already inhabited the entire continent as self-governing sovereign polities exercising Law in relationship to water, land, animals and other resources. Today, increasingly, these polities are described as nations. For Indigenous Australians, country – in which land and water are indivisible – continues to have far more than Western economic significance; it is foundational to the Law, which underpins all aspects of Indigenous societies. Western colonisation resulted in often violent conflict and dispossession of land, waters and natural resources as the colonial frontier expanded. This chapter begins with an account of Indigenous dispossession, and then looks at the process of restitution, which only began in the mid-1960s.The discussion of the use of the land, the freshwater and the seas in the second part of the chapter shows the shift over time to the present day, when pastoralism, fisheries, mining, tourism and national reserves coexist with altered forms of Indigenous economy.